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solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG
Thu Jan 16 15:10:01 GMT 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ``` On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 06:41:00PM -0800, Aaron Janse wrote: > I think that one-line-per-paragraph would be much better for mobile phones. > I personally use a web browser proxy to read gemini pages when on mobile. > Text wrapped at 80 columns looks horrible. Text wrapped at 40 columns looks > okay, depending on my font size. But if text was one-line-per-paragraph, > firefox would wrap it wonderfully with *zero* effort from the proxy author. I am kind of reluctant to make any Gemini design decisions based on theassumption of a web browser as the user agent. I understand that inthese very early days this is by far the quickest and easiest way to getinto Geminispace, and for smartphones it's probably the *only* viableway. But I hope that as time moves forward the proxies will become aniche thing, serving as a "gateway drug" for real clients. This issurely a valuable role, but for regular use I think they should be"considered harmful". They represent single (or few) points of failure,they involve trusting the proxy operator not to manipulate content(Gemini isn't sophisticated enough to permit proper TLS proxying, so thethe web proxy is basically a MITM between client and server), proxyoperators have more opportunities to log and track their users thanindividual Gemini servers do, and proxy users need to run vastly morecomplex than necessary software (i.e. web browsers, although at leastGemini proxies should typically be usable with nice alternative browserslike dillo). (aside: some of these issues go away with proxies designed to be runlocally by the user - a nice project for anybody itching for one!) None of this is to say the web proxies or bad and that people shouldn'trun them or use them - I'm very gratefully to the people who have setthem up! But I don't think of them as "first class" clients, and givena choice between pushing implementation effort onto native clientauthors or onto web proxy authors, I will make life easier for nativeclient authors every time. Besides, getting a web proxy to provide beautiful wrapping if atext/gemini file is hard-wrapped at 40 chars involves nothing more thanwrapping paragraphs in <p> and </p> tags. That's a significantly easiertask than getting a terminal client to provide beautiful wrapping if atext/gemini file has lines thousands of characters long, which requiressplitting the line into words, calculating and summing the lengths ofwords, etc, etc. Given the choice between making web proxy authors doa little bit more work and makig native client authors to a moderateamount of more work, I'm definitely going to choose the former. > I can only imagine unlimited-column text catastrophically failing in two > places: > > 1. A very wide terminal > 2. A very wide web browser Neither of which are terribly uncommon, right, with full-screen windowson desktops or even laptops? My "daily driver" laptop terminal is 113chars wide. Although, even on a terminal < 80 chars wide, I kind ofconsider words being split across lines as pretty severe failure. Idon't want to read that - it's even less pleasant than hard-wrapped 80char lines on a mobile. > Thanks, solderpunk, for being a thoughtful BDFL! I'm glad you think I'm thoughtful! Sorry if I seem to be dismissing the"long lines" approach out of hand, I promise you I'm giving it a lot ofthought. I'm already stressing out that I'm being unduly influenced bythe fact that I use simple / old-fashioned editors and mostly writestuff that should be hard-wrapped (plain text email, gopher content,source code). From my perspective, writing "long line" content is aless pleasant experience for authors, because my editors don't work thatway out of the box. But I realise that, actually, for the majority ofpeople that's far *more* accessible. Someone using something resemblingNotepad is going to have a miserable time writing content hard-wrappedat 40 chars, while the "long line" format just happens, probably withoutthem even realising it. Then again, making text/gemini easy to write with "normal" editorsarguably isn't worth much if the next step is anyway "now use sftp or agit push to get your content on the server". Gemini is never going tobe able to support easy WYSIWIG authoring experiences akin to WordPress,so perhaps it's pointless to consider the user experience fornon-technical types. Argh! Simplicity ain't simple. Cheers,Solderpunk